You’ll soon be able to hold video chat meetings with much larger groups as today Google begins increasing the number of participants Apps customers can have in a Google Hangouts video call at any one time. The old limit of 10 participants today gets increased to 25 users.

The change comes to Apps customers only— Business, Government, and Education—while all other Hangouts users will still have the old limit of 10 participants for video.

Google notes that it will only show “the 10 most active video call participants” along the bottom of the video chat to maintain quality, but it will switch on the fly between active users for the new limit of up to 25 participants.

All Apps customers should start to see the new participant limit increase roll out over the next few days.

Google announced today on Twitter that it’s giving away $25 in Google Play store credit & free shipping to everyone that purchases the Nexus 7 through the Play store. That brings the cost down to around the same amount as the $199 deals we’ve seen on 9to5Toys through Walmart, Amazon and others in recent weeks. The deal is only available for those purchasing the Nexus 7 through the Google Play store online in the US and Canada, and the credit will be emailed at the time the device ships.

Holiday Special: $25 Google Play credit and free shipping.*

For a limited time, you will receive a $25 Google Play credit when you purchase a Nexus 7 from the Play Store. Your Google Play credit will be emailed when your Nexus 7 ships.

Also on offer is a free HD movie rental from Google Play with the purchase of Google’s $35 Chromecast.

You’ll be able to find the Nexus 7 for $199 this Black Friday through a number of retailers. Stay tuned to 9to5Toys for all the latest deals.

Chrome version 25 was released with a new Web Speech API that allows web developers to integrate speech-to-text dictation into their web applications.

The other feature of importance on the new version is the removal of “silent extensions.” Silent extensions are web-browser extensions that install without your knowledge. From now on, every web extension installation must be manually approved.

The updated version is available here, but Chrome’s auto-update feature may have already installed it for you.

Today ComScore confirmed Google+ has officially hit 25 million unique users less than a month after its public launch. We told you not to worry when Experian Hitwise reported a 3% decrease in traffic for the new social network and today’s report from ComScore confirms our hunch that Google might actually be on the right track.

To put this in perspective, rival Facebook took approximately three years to reach the same milestone, while Twitter took two and a half. Twenty-five million may be a long way from the more than 750 million current Facebook users, but it is certainly a step in the right direction after similar services such as Buzz have been long abandoned.

Its quite obvious Google is pretty serious about this whole Google+ Facebook/Twitter-killer thing and the incredible rate of growth should be more than enough encouragement to make it a big focus over at the GooglePlex. They have already done so by integrating the service into almost every aspect of their other services from Gmail, which SearchEngineLand notes seems to be tied to Google+ adoption, to YouTube Live integration, and rolling out updates for the Android app to both fix issues and add functionality.
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